Autumn stirs memories of WWII combat for Pickerington man

Monday

Nov 11, 2013 at 12:01 AMNov 11, 2013 at 12:45 PM

This time of year makes Harry A. Curtis think about the war. Not so much because today is Veterans Day but because, on Oct. 20, 1944, he arrived in Marseilles, France, with the Army's 100th Infantry Division, 399th Infantry Regiment, Company D.

Jeb Phillips, The Columbus Dispatch

This time of year makes Harry A. Curtis think about the war.

Not so much because today is Veterans Day but because, on Oct. 20, 1944, he arrived in Marseilles, France, with the Army’s 100th Infantry Division, 399th Infantry Regiment, Company D.

On Oct. 31, he moved to front-line duty near the Vosges Mountains. That first night, he saw the rockets’ red glare and the bombs bursting in air above him. He thought of the national anthem, he said, and how it does not properly communicate the terror that an 18-year-old feels in a foxhole.

(Fireworks on the Fourth of July don’t feel celebratory to him, either).

On this day 69 years ago, Curtis had been fighting for less than two weeks. He already had assumed the first gunner position on an 82 mm mortar because the real first gunner had been wounded. First gunners were supposed to be corporals, but Curtis was only a private.

He already had overrun German foxholes with other soldiers, and had looked down into one to find that it had straw. He was envious because American foxholes didn’t have that luxury.

He looked closer and saw a photo of a man, his wife and their two children. He had been taught in training to kill or be killed. But he had a different view when he saw that photo.

“I thought, ‘These people are like us,’” he said during a recent interview in his Pickerington home. His wife of 62 years, Lois, sat across from him. They have two daughters.

Curtis is 87. He grew up in Lorain in northeastern Ohio and was drafted just after he graduated from high school. He came back from World War II, got married, went to college and law school, came to central Ohio for a job and practiced law here until 1993.

He has started talking about the war only in the last couple of years, said daughter Cathy Penix, 49. He knows there aren’t many World War II veterans left and wants to tell his story.

He never regrets going into the war, he said. But he came to realize that the enemy could be like him. He saw the destruction that bombs can cause. And he was nearly killed many times.

On New Year’s Day 1945, he was by himself in the face of advancing German forces. He had 45 rounds of ammunition and two grenades, and he was 19 years old. He figured he was going to die until a lieutenant came upon him and ordered him to retreat.

Because of what he saw, Curtis is anti-war.

“I thought, as I got older, that this was death-dealing,” he said.

He is against killing, even though he knows that the mortars he fired probably killed people. He traps flies, bees and ladybugs that get indoors, then lets them loose outside.

“I was yelled at the first time I stepped on a spider,” his daughter said.

Curtis’ recent opening-up about the war has helped Penix learn more about her dad and reinforced some of what she already knew. She has been especially interested to find out that he did once take orders, because she has never seen that.

“I think about him the same way that I do about the current military,” Penix said. “I just have to admire them because I can’t imagine what they go through.”

It’s this season more than any other — November, a little chill in the air — that Curtis remembers.

“These were my first weeks of the war,” he said.

jeb.phillips@dispatch.com

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